Other Women
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Fiona, an accomplished young artist, falls in love with Raymond. An older married man. Their haunted relationship evolves in a floating melange of restaurants and hotel rooms against the looming backdrop of their separate, anonymous cities. Although erotically charged, the affair is never consummated - yet the love Fiona feels intensifies into an obsession that continues to possess her long after Raymond leaves her. Along the way, at receptions and restaurant tables, at dinner parties and on trips, Fiona meets other men and women in relationships that are coming together or falling apart-friendships, marriages, love affairs - each offering their own version of love's nature. And, throughout, Raymond's wife Helen holds a central place. For Fiona, Helen herself is "the other woman" - mysterious, enviable and untouchable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The magnificent excess of emotion that fuels unrequited, obsessional love is the subject of this first novel from the 23-year-old Lau (author, at 17, of the memoir Runaway and later of Fresh Girls and Other Stories). Fiona, 24, is an artist enjoying a successful career until she falls hard for Raymond, a married man in his 40s with "the face of someone for whom making a living means causing hurt to others." Among those whom this smooth-talking, linen-trousered lothario hurts is Fiona, as he alternately entices and rebuffs her. Fiona's dolorous descent into a yearlong binge of emotional masochism is explained by such statements as "love is larger than the bodies and minds of the people it occupies" and references to parallels to her parents' troubled relationship, begging the question of the affair's deeper significance. This is fertile, brambly territory that has been exquisitely rendered by Proust and, more recently, Annie Ernaux, but it strains the talents of a greener writer. Lau excels, however, in brief flares of visceral imagery, as when Fiona describes her lover's body with the painterly eye of a woman too easily seduced by surfaces.
